Poster Instructions OUHSC College of Allied Health Office of Academic and Student Services AHB 1009 / 405.271.6588 Please read this document carefully to help save you time and frustration. The College of Allied Health in its Office of Academic and Student Services (OASS) has a poster printer available for faculty and student use. The printer s primary purpose is for faculty and student professional presentations, and it is not available for projects outside the College. You are welcome to utilize a commercial printing company at your own expense if these instructions and guidelines do not fit your needs. The following steps are required to fulfill requests for a poster print job: 1) Preparing Poster: Comply with technical instructions for poster design. Thoroughly review poster for typos and other errors. Print a small scale printout of poster to check for typos. Correct all typos. Verify poster size. Save file as final version. Back up your file. 2) Approval to print and timeline: Complete Poster Order Form including poster size in inches. If you don t complete the form, we will not print the poster. Department contact must sign the form to approve. OASS will print poster after receiving: o the signed Poster Order Form, and o an electronic version of poster file (CD, DVD, or email). Allow a minimum of 5 business days from the time of submission of the electronic file to receive a completed poster with dry ink for transportation or display. Required Technical Instructions Poster Size 1) Poster size needs to be selected before beginning the poster design as it impacts resolution and layout decisions. See this website for more help in planning your poster: http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/posterpres.html
2) Available printer paper roll sizes are 36 and 42 on photo quality paper. 3) Select overall poster size, height x width. This information must be provided on the order form. Poster size must be calculated as inches, not feet or cm. The following options are available: a) 36 x 48 b) 36 x 60 c) 42 x 60 d) 42 x 72 4) PowerPoint will only print 56 wide; therefore, if you are making a poster wider than 56, you will need to reduce the page setup dimensions by half and then we will print at 200%. For example, to create a 42 x 72 finished poster size created in PowerPoint, the page setup should be 21 x 36 and then we will print at 200%. Resolution for graphics for this poster must be doubled and the print order MUST specify printing at 200%. See order form below for additional information. Color/Background 1) Posters are required to have white or pale colored backgrounds with black or dark text. 2) Color may be used for image frames and graphics within the body of the poster. 3) Standard templates are available at our website www.ah.ouhsc.edu/main/poster_printing.asp. Text 1) The title should be readable from a distance of 15 20 feet. San serif fonts are required for titles and section headers. Please select from one of the following san serif fonts. The standard template is available for each of these fonts. o Arial o Lucida Sans o Tahoma o Verdana Font size for titles should create 1.5 to 3 letters on the final poster (70 to 120 point size, depending upon font style). Font size for subtitles should provide 1 letters on the final poster (40 to 60 point size, depending upon font style). Sentence case is recommended for all titles (not title case or all caps). See http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/posterdesign for further discussion of sentence case. Department, College, and University name are required in subtitle, unless prohibited by poster competition rules.
2) All text should be readable from a distance of 6 feet. Simple serif fonts are required for text. Please select from one of the following serif fonts. The standard template is available for each of these fonts. o Bookman Old Style (12-point) o Century Schoolbook (12-point) o Palatino Linotype (12 point) o Perpetua (14-point) o Times New Roman (12-point) Note that fonts vary in the compression or kerning of the letters. The shape of numbers also vary considerably across these five fonts. Font size should be at least 20 point for text, but you can also try 28 point, or 36 point. Width of text columns should be between 40 60 characters (11 15 words). Use underlining only for web addresses ie, www.ouhsc.edu. Use italics as needed for emphasis, citation titles, and Genus species. Use bold as needed for emphasis, headings, and titles. For consistency, use spaces rather than relying on tabs for indention. Left align text is easier to read than fully justified text blocks. First line indent and a left tab setting may be used to align bulleted text that wraps to a second line. Chart/Graphs/Legends 1) Plan to start with graphics with 300 dpi resolution. Determine image or graphic resolution. o Open file in Microsoft Photo Editor (or other image editing software, 30 day trial versions are readily available online). o With cursor over image, right click and select Properties, OR o Go to File and select Properties. 2) Black and white line drawings (bitmaps) should be saved at 1200 dpi. If you are creating original line drawings, thick lines will generate better quality graphics. 3) Plan for a final print resolution no less than 150 dpi. Beware most images or graphics from the Internet are saved at low resolutions (usually 72 dpi). These images will be blurry or pixilated if printed at a higher resolution or at dimensions larger than they appeared on a webpage. Be careful to maintain aspect ratios, so that a graphic does not get stretched or distorted in one or more dimensions. If you need the graphic to be a specific size or proportion, it is better to use a crop tool. Additional programs that can be used for image editing are: Paint Shop Pro, Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop. To find the image resolution, select Properties. 4) Microsoft Excel is a good tool for creating graphs. It allows you to change size, shape, color, font of almost any element by clicking on the item until it is highlighted. Once an element is selected, right click to see available tools. Axis labels on graphs should use sentence case. Title for graphs and charts: o Use legend box, OR o Use same format as images and tables.
Images 1) Plan to start with graphics with 300 dpi resolution. 2) Final images should be no less than 150 dpi when printing 100% dimension. 3) Final images should be no less than 300 dpi when printing 200% dimension. 4) Use the import feature when adding images and graphic elements (not copy/paste). 5) Imported image size should match the image dimension on the finished poster. Reduce image file size to 3 x 5 if that is the size it will appear on poster. Do not attempt to enlarge an image greater than its original dimensions. Additional Technical Guidelines Layout/Margins Use PowerPoint templates provided at the OASS website. o Arial / Times New Roman o Arial / Palatino o Lucida Sans / Palatino o Tahoma / Palatino o Verdana / Palatino Respect the margins provided by the template. Generous white space makes the poster more readable. Set your goal at 20% graphics, 40% text, and 40% white space. Software for Poster Creation PowerPoint Printer driver for HP DesignJet 800ps (42 in) http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/techsupport/driverdownload.jsp?pnam eoid=377958&locale=en_us&taskid=135&prodseriesid=25302&prodtypeid= 18972 File Formats.ppt PowerPoint or.pdf Adobe portable document format Advice from other sources (links confirmed 4/29/10) From Colin Purrington, a faculty member at Swarthmore. http://www.swarthmore.edu/natsci/cpurrin1/posteradvice.htm Block, Steven. Do s and Don ts of Poster Presentation, Biophysical Journal, 71(6): 3527 3529, 1996 http://www.waspacegrant.org/pdf/block.pdf Ritchison, Gary. Material in syllabus for Bio 801 Scientific Literature and Writing: Poster Presentations. http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/posterpres.html U.S. Department of Energy, Environmental Management Science Program Workshop, Tips for Effective Poster Presentations http://www.osti.gov/em52/workshop/tipsexhibits.html Resources from Case Western https://ora.ra.cwru.edu/showcase/posterguidelines.cfm
Poster Printing Order Form Name Phone Department Date poster is needed (allow a minimum of 5 business days) Poster size 36 X 48 36 X 60 [18 X 30 PowerPoint slide to print at 200% Resolution] 42 X 60 [21 X 30 PowerPoint slide to print at 200% Resolution] 42 X 72 [21 X 36 PowerPoint slide to print at 200% Resolution] Planned use for poster: Where/when will poster be displayed? Are there colors that are critical for images reproduced in the poster? Yes No Signature of Faculty or Student Signature of Department Chair/Contact Date Date Deliver the following to the Office of Academic and Student Services, AHB 1009 or email documents to debbie arnold@ouhsc.edu and cheryl walk@ouhsc.edu: o Completed order form, signed by Department Chair or Faculty contact, o Electronic file via email, or on a CD or DVD with file name and format; and o Small scale paper version of the poster. Job Number: For Office Only Poster Print Job Notes Date: